The Lashkar-i-Taiba is a militant Islamic group that has been fighting the occupation of the Kashmir by India.
I don’t really care about the Kashmir at this point. It’s another one of those names like Beirut and Northern Ireland and Jerusalem that evoke, for me, the long tired endurance of vindictive human folly.
The point is that until 9/11, the United States didn’t much care about them either. It was not illegal to belong to the Lashkar-i-Taiba, just as it is not illegal to belong to the Labour Party in Britain, the Green Party in Germany, or to be a personal friend of General Augusto Pinochet.
Just as it is not illegal to own guns, in the enlightened United States of America. The Republicans, in fact, just tried (and failed) to make it illegal to believe that gun companies should ever be liable for anything at all.
But the ever-vigilant Department of Homeland Insecurity found out about 11 Moslem men who like to play paintball. They were arrested. They were questioned. Astonishingly, they turned out to be Moslem! Astonishingly, they had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba. They had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba before the government decided it was illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba.
You would think that someone with common sense would say, it wasn’t illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba at the time they belong to it. Let’s give them a warning about the terrorist nature of this organization and let them go.
Not in your lifetime! And miss the opportunity to let the public know how you, the mighty Bush Administration, are stopping terrorists everywhere, dead in their tracks?
Somehow, one of them was “persuaded” to testify that the 11 were, in fact, thinking about something like something that might be construed as “anti-American” or something, and therefore should go to prison for the rest of their lives. The pattern for these trials is always the same: the only witness gets a much lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony against the others.
Would you tell the truth if you had a choice between being charged with very serious offenses that could result in sentences of up to 100 years, or being charged with less serious crimes that could result in just a few years in a jail? Tough choice.
To be specific, Yong Ki Kwon, 28, and Khwaja Mahmood Hasan, testified that they had wanted to fight for the Taliban against the U.S. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where the Taliban was the government, that’s somewhat like taking a couple of German boys from New Jersey in 1944, and putting them on trial for thinking about going home to Germany to join the army. And then sending them to prison for 100 years. Meanwhile, the soldiers that actually did fight against Americans, in Germany, are all released within months of the end of hostilities.
Once again, we have “terrorists” convicted of being terrorists, without the government actually proving– or even claiming to want to prove– that they actually committed any crimes, other than the thought-crimes of being Islamic and foreign.
If Mr. Ashcroft is doing such a fabulous job of rooting out terrorists, how come he has yet to catch a single person actually planning a terrorist attack? Once again, he has nabbed a bunch of Moslems, labeled them “terrorists”, and locked them up, without being able to show that they were actually planning to commit a single crime. In fact, the government admits that it has no evidence that the men were planning any attacks at all in the U.S. Yet, they may well go to prison for 20 – 40 years?!
This is an outrage.
The Men:
Ahmed Abu-Ali (in Saudi Arabia, being sought).
Randall Todd Royer,
Donald Thomas Surratt,
Masoud Ahmad Khan,
Caliph Basha Ibn
Hammad Abdur-Raheem
Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi Mohammed Aatique
Khwaja Mahmood Hasan
Sabri Benkhala
“…one of them, Masoud Ahmad Khan, had a photograph downloaded from the Internet of the FBI headquarters building in Washington.” Along with about 10 million tourists.
You know, the more you read about this case, the more bizarre it appears. The men are charged with training in combat tactics– like about 7 million militia members in the U.S. They heard lectures on the righteousness of “violent jihad” in Kashmir. I’ve probably heard lectures more filled with violent hatred from Christians in North America for Hollywood and liberals.
It is considered sinister that these men had guns. What? Like about 50 million other Americans?
There undoubtedly are real terrorists out there. We can’t catch them. We’re not that smart. We haven’t really succeeded in infiltrating their organizations. So let’s take the people we catch– like these poor 11 schmucks from Virginia– and pin something on them. That’s the truth.